“If we consider modern China in a larger sense, like introducing progress, introducing freedom, a humane way of dealing with people, then the empress was the real founder of modern China.”

Jung Chang

on the Empress Dowager Cixi

Jung Chang knows China, its history, its people. She is, after all, the woman who wrote Wild Swans.

The epic story of 100 years of Chinese history through the eyes of three women — her grandmother, her mother and her — Wild Swans was released in 1991 and quickly became one of the highest-selling non-fiction paperback books ever published.

Chang painted a vivid portrait of the political and military turmoil of China from the marriage of her grandmother to a warlord — she was his concubine — to her mother’s devotion to Mao Zedong and the Communist Party of China, and finally her own life as a member of the Red Guards and her subsequent disillusionment.

Then came Mao, the Unknown Story in 2005, which Chang wrote with her husband Jon Halliday.

Now, after an eight-year hiatus, she is back with Empress Dowager Cixi, the concubine who launched China. It is the story of the woman who ruled China for almost 50 years, from concubine to empress, and who brought staggering changes to the country in industry, railways, telegraph. But she is still believed to be a villain and a despot.

In a recent interview in Toronto, Chang laughs when asked if Empress Dowager Cixi will be banned in China. (Wild Swans and Mao still are banned there.)

“I don’t know . . . even if it is, it will make its way there.”

The interview has been edited and condensed.

Q: Why now, why the story of the Empress Dowager Cixi now?

A: My previous book, on Mao, had finished after 12 years of work. I was looking for a subject and she seemed to be a wonderful subject because her reputation was — still is — so different from the little bit I know of what she did. And this means there were myths to uncover, truths to find out, detective work to do.

Q: She is fascinating, isn’t she?

A: She certainly is. She ruled China for nearly half a century starting from 1861, when she launched a palace coup and seized power and made herself the ruler of China because her husband died and her son became the next emperor but he was only 5. At that time, male and female were strictly segregated. The officials were all male so she had to sit behind a silk screen when she had an audience with them. It was from this very bizarre and disadvantaged position that she proceeded to change China. She established contact with the West and she launched reforms and she brought a medieval empire into the modern age.

Q: What struck you the most about her rule?

A: Her ability to understand the future, to do what was then considered revolutionary.

The empress launched a series of political reforms, some of which are still unsurpassed. She banned foot binding, she liberated women, she espoused women’s liberation, she gave them education. She introduced the western legal systems and abolished medieval forms of punishment. She introduced the free press. She had her flaws but her progress from medieval monarch to a modern leader was mind-blowing. Her last project was to turn China into a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament.

Q: The empress was cruel, too. She took away her sister’s son and made him emperor when he was 3. And then she murdered him.

A: I don’t think she was evil but she was capable of immense ruthlessness. In the case of her adopted son, she was incredibly insensitive. She lacked a motherly instinct. Look, he plotted to kill her. She knew that if he survived her, China would fall into Japan’s hands because they controlled the young emperor. And at that time, you have to remember, Japan was turning toward becoming a fascist country. That would have been a nightmare. She did what she believed was best for China.

Q: What role did she play in making China what it is now?

A: Economically, what we have today is because of her: electricity, telegraph, railways, modern mining, modern industry, a modern form of navy and army and the concept of learning from the West.

Q: Do people in China know what she did for the country?

A: No. She is still the villain. She was cast into that role soon after she died, when China became a republic. People still don’t give her the credit for all the achievement. People always credit the men around her.

Q: Do people just not know her, or has she deliberately been portrayed as a villain?

A: It’s a mix of both. People have accepted the existing version that she was a villain. In Chinese culture, as it is with many others, it is easier to vilify women. The rulers after her deliberately blackened her name; they wanted to portray China under her as hell on earth and that it fell on them to liberate China.

That was all untrue. Yes, Mao (Zedong) founded a modern totalitarian China, but if we consider modern China in a larger sense, like introducing progress, introducing freedom, a humane way of dealing with people, then the empress was the real founder of modern China.

Q: How do you think the empress would have fared in modern China?

A: She would not have approved of the level of destruction to Chinese culture. Her kind of modernization was not like a bulldozer. China doesn’t look like China now, it looks like the West. A culture of 5,000 years of history in her modernization, she assessed every step, she debated it.